In a panoramic breakfast room perched on the rocks, overlooking the motion in the ocean, us lodgers scoff our first-meal bagels communally, around a large wooden table.
All with such nonchalance that you’d think there was absolutely no view worth witnessing from out of those floor-to-ceiling windows.
I gas with the assembled breakfast club in order of attractiveness, which is really very wrong – especially since they’re all sat right next to their respective partners.
What a wild old time we’re having over our morning treats and steaming drinks, this incongruous gaggle of English, Canadian, Argentinian and Michiganders.
The latter of which demonstrate exactly where they live in the world by pointing at an open hand. Their dog makes more sense.
The upshot of all this casual banter is – if you have a dog, it’s tricky to find places to stay, but you will get lots of attention; and, I need to acquaint myself with Argentina (preferably by going there).
I’m recommended this by a Very Serious Man, but one with a reassuringly friendly outlook (which is possible), and by his bright-eyed enthusiastic partner.
I apologise for wandering into their impromptu video on the rocks last night, and it’s all hey man no worries. We’re all wanderers now, we have no home except for a kind of freedom which you could call ‘the road’. Ugh.
Alas, they also all have paying jobs.
A scramble around the rocks by the lake is all very well in the cold daybreak sunshine, as long as you don’t fall in.
My cowboy boots give me just about the right amount of grip to stay on a kind of dry land – if you can call it that.
Yes yes, I’m an explorer – one with a wi-fi connection and a hot cup of tea … so what, bite me!
I drift out of that joint and into my rented SUV, driving past my tented Michigan friends, to park up by the bridge around the corner.
The fake path to the left which goes to the unlikely dam, a hidden place.
It’s a curious scene.
Where calm water suddenly spills over the edge and onto the rocks below, putting itself about and sprawling around in a glittering show of ebullience, all the time watched on by a crowd of blooming trees. We stand agape, and mostly upright.
But I’m being led up the garden path here, the trail goes no further.
So I go back to the start, the Scenic High Falls – named by someone short on imagination. Perhaps they should have consulted the Lake Naming Board of Canada, they know what they’re doing.
I’ve brought myself around to a kind of mini Niagara – I get slightly wet, a little uplifted, and there’s a lot of noise. I’m glad there’s no-one else around, is my thought.
I shake it all off by running around in circles, taking my balmy time to find the trail … which after a fruitless fifteen minute search I suddenly realise is exactly where the map said it would be.
Now walking through forests where the trees are talking to me – they’re telling me to get my shit together.
And to do or do not; there is no try.
What is this, a group of motivational beeches?
All I’m trying to do is get to a good view of something worth looking at (much like everyone else in life).
Eventually I arrive at the clearing where the pylons live, in a perfectly straight line running directly betwen the thick forest on either side.
Beyond which, a treacherous trail over given-up semi-retired trees and steep-enough inclines and helter-skelter declines. To arrive at the very same bridge I checked in at earlier, only to find out that Groningen is 6,029km away.
As I’m contemplating the Netherlands, the Michiganders pass by in their whale of a truck. For some reason, we all pretend that we’ve not seen each other.
We’ve all moved on, is what.
It’s taken an hour and a half to get here, practically back to where I started the day, and now I have to do the whole damn thing in reverse, just to get back to my sled.
Appearing at the clearing, a human being doing nothing but pace around, near his blue car. What schemes is he cooking up oer there, I wonder.
I can only hope this party crasher doesn’t follow me down the twisted track.
Firstly, because the chitchat part of my mind is asleep – comatose – while I enjoy my solitary hike.
And secondly, because I’d like to see this evening, if possible.
It’s with fleet feet that I reach the opening again at High Falls.
The pink totem pole is still there, as are the artists and the prospectors and all of the imitators.
And I don’t know if my eyes are deceiving me, but those falls look even more raging now. It’s a whitewater torrent of humid abuse, a right old soggy scene.
Returning up the boring hill is a farm selling jelly, across the blueberry fields which have fallen into fallowness. It’s a sticky jam which I want no part of.
Slick tyres carry my cargo and I up that hill and back to the highway, where the whopping plastic birds continue to keep watch over the wild geese population.
I set a course east, along the 101, a tiresome monotonous drawl of tarmac taking me deep into the wilderness … trees, trees and more trees.
The amount of vehicles I pass could possibly be counted on one hand, perhaps two. Every one in those vehicles has committed a crime at some point, I reason.
On those rare occasions I pass someone, or someone passes me, I spend the next ten minutes contemplating the severity of their felonies.
This is what I like to call entertainment out here.
I spend my arid journey pondering all of these clandestine crimes of passion, all the while neck-deep in my own crimes of waterproof fashion.
Chapleau is a kind of welcome relief; until the realisation quickly dawns that this is little more than a very large railway yard, an LCBO, and a gas station.
My guest house isn’t even open.
I have landed in the dead centre of emptiness, and will pay for the privilege.
An Outside World 